Fall 2004
Tired Progress
by Julia Miller
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Pat Jensen loads tires into his truck near Custer for delivery at Larry’s Tire Recycling in Burlington. |
After a long life of rolling on the road, every tire must expire. When that day comes, the work of Pat Jensen begins.
Dirt showers down as Jensen and fellow co-workers heave 600 tires, one by one, into a wire-cage truck. Jensen stands on the wooden truck bed, rolling and stacking tires onto a jumbled pile. He does this every day, picking up loads of 500 to 700 junk tires from all over Washington.
Jensen’s work as a scrap-tire hauler was once more common. Until the ’60s, rubber from scrap tires was routinely recycled. That changed when cheap, imported oil made creating new, synthetic tires more cost-effective than reclaiming rubber from old tires. In 2001, Washington state sent 1.7 million scrap tires into landfills, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. That means residents threw away 36 percent of the 4.67 million scrap tires generated in Washington that year, also according to Ecology. The remaining tires were retreaded, recycled or incinerated as fuel. While many other states have state-sponsored tire-recycling programs, Washington has few laws and no government programs set up to help keep tires out of landfills. This puts Washington significantly behind the rest of the country in finding an environmentally friendly solution for disposal of scrap tires. Some local businesses, however, have found innovative ways to recycle rubber.
Jensen transports tires to his employer, Larry’s Tire Recycling, which is located in Burlington.
Recently, Jensen delivered a load of tires from a Whatcom County stream cleanup project. Ironically, the tires Jensen removed were purposefully placed in the stream as part of a salmon habitat-enhancement project in the ’70s. The twisted and mud-encrusted tires are being removed to help restore the stream to a more natural state.
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Seven to eight semitrailiers drop tires at Ash Grove Cement daily. The tires are transported by a series of conveyor belts and elevators to an incinerator that burns the tires for fuel. |
At Larry’s, a tire baler binds 65 tires into a compact rubber block held together by five metal straps. In Colorado, people use similar tire bales to build well-
insulated houses.
“I have had some people approach me about using tire bales and the blocks — not contractors — just people inquiring,” said Sam Price, the owner of Larry’s. “When you have a three-and-a-half-foot thick wall, the R-value is in excess of 200. A higher R-value means a higher heat insulation value. My dad used to say you could cool the building with an ice cube and heat it with a candle.”
Although no such buildings exist in Whatcom County, buildings could be made with tire bales and even tire-filled cement blocks.
In a chain-link-fenced yard behind Larry’s, an excavator places a tire bale into a 6-by-3.5-by-4-foot mold, and the bale is then encapsulated in cement. The whole conglomeration hardens into a 9,500 pound, tire-filled cement block. These blocks are called Mr. Samz Superblocks. They look similar to ecology blocks, solid cement blocks that usually are more than 4 feet square and weigh at least 15,000 pounds.
“We reduce weight by 40 percent, making the blocks much easier and safer to work with,” Price said.
The blocks are used in retaining walls, breakwaters and even dams. Larry’s receives tires from throughout the state, processing approximately 3,000 tires a week.
“Scrap tires make the world go ‘round,” said Roy Salinas, an employee at Beacon Batteries and Tires in Whatcom County.
Beacon Batteries and Tires is one of the few places in Whatcom County that accepts and sells recycled tires for passenger vehicles.
“This tire here is probably about $110 new,” said Mark Beck, the owner of Beacon Batteries and Tires. “I’ll sell it to you for about $15, install it and balance it.”
Beck also accepts scrap tires from wrecking yards across the county and sends them to several places, including Larry’s and Ash Grove Cement in Seattle.
“Wood kilns and cement kilns need a tremendous (amount) of heat to make their product,” Beck said. “Typically, they burn coal, which is a finite resource. People are burrowing a mile deep in the earth for it. And you’ve got all these tires lying around.”
Ash Grove Cement, which operates nine plants throughout the country, has been burning tires as fuel for almost 10 years at its Seattle location.
“If you burn a tire, the heat energy — the kinetic energy — is more for a pound of tire than it is in a pound of coal,” Beck said. “So they have tire-derived fuel. That’s what happens to most tires.”
A pound of bituminous coal, the fuel for most cement plants, contains roughly 12,000 British Thermal Units per pound, whereas a pound of tire contains 14,000 Btu, said Craig Mifflin, the production manager of Ash Grove Cement.
Tire-derived fuel requires no expensive processing. The tire burns whole, and the metal strip inside the tire vaporizes in the extreme heat.
“It’s fairly common in the industry,” said Craig Puljan, plant manager at Ash Grove Cement. “In fact, Ash Grove has three facilities that are burning TDF and two in the permitting phase.”
Seven to eight semitrailers drop truckloads at Ash Grove every day, which means nearly 49,000 tires go into the kiln each week. Sitting in a control booth a city block away, an operator controls the maze of conveyor belts and elevators that measure and add tire fuel to the cement kiln. The tires enter the kiln near the end of the heating process, at a point where the temperature inside is approximately 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Not only do tires completely vaporize at this temperature, but their smoke combusts as well, said Gerald Brown, the plant’s environmental supervisor.
“Generally speaking, there’s kind of a bad stigma because people envision burning tires in the back yard with black smoke,” Brown said. “When you take a tire and you put it into an environment that’s oxygen rich and a very high temperature, roughly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, they burn very quickly and without smoke.”
The emissions coming from the top of the tower appear clear and measure well below EPA emissions standards, Brown said. According to the EPA Web site, in 2001, cement plants burned 46 percent of the 115 million scrap tires used as tire-derived fuel in the United States.
Facilities permitted by state and local regulatory agencies to burn tires must comply with federal, state and local emissions standards.
“It makes good sense economically, and it makes great sense environmentally,” Mifflin said. “The main alternative to TDF is shredding or landfilling. Many tires are just sitting in large piles, breeding mosquitoes and problems. This year to date, we’ve burned close to a million tires.”
Most scrap-tire recycling in Washington is in the hands of private companies that created markets for themselves. The trend is reversed around the country, with many states having comprehensive tire recycling programs. In Arizona, hundreds of miles of roads are paved with rubber-asphalt pavement. While this special pavement is more expensive to install, it has a service life of 25 years compared to 11 years for conventional pavement. Arizona State University recently conducted a study comparing four miles of conventionally paved roads with four miles of rubber-asphalt roads. The university found using rubber-asphalt roads saves $198,440 per mile because of reduced inspection, longer-lasting smoothness, a tougher surface and even reduced road noise.
In 2001, Ecology examined the feasibility of rubber-asphalt roads and released its Scrap Tire Report. The report examined the potential for a scrap-tire market in Washington and proposed several different scrap-tire recycling alternatives to landfills. Dave Nightingale, co-author of Ecology’s Scrap Tire Report, said that since Ecology published the report, Washington has made little progress toward new tire legislation.
“We have to have some kind of critical mass of support in both houses,” said Nightingale. “We can get the House, but not the Senate.”
With few government guidelines for scrap-tire disposal, local businesses like Larry’s, Beacon Batteries and Tires and Ash Grove Cement slowly pare down the growing piles of tires. While tire-derived fuel effectively recycles tires and uses up their valuable hydrocarbons, Nightingale said one must consider the effect burning tires has on air pollution. Although burning fuel is not generally viewed as environmentally friendly, it is better to fuel cement plants with tires than coal, Nightingale said. Until Washington state adopts comprehensive scrap-tire legislation, the market for recycled tires will not improve. Nearly 40 percent of scrap tires will continue to fill landfills instead of ending up in the back of Jensen’s truck.
Jensen climbs into the cab of his truck, and the diesel roars to life. He waves as his tires roll him back onto the road and he heads for another tire collection. His tires spin with millions of others, rolling across Washington’s highways. When the tires wear out, many of them will be recycled. During this year, though, more than a million reusable tires will take up space in one of Washington’s crowded landfills, wasting a resource on which the rest of the country is capitalizing.